The Best Way To Test Yourself Is To Start From Nothing

Piers
Fawkes, founder of PSFK, says his job is "making sure that our
thinking is the most progressive that there is out
there."PSFK

Piers Fawkes, founder and editor-in-chief of trends analysis site
PSFK, knows what it takes to
make something out of nothing.

The British entrepreneur started working in the digital space in
1996 — "very early in the U.K." — and a few years and jobs later,
got burned when the dot com bubble burst.

By 2003, he decided he had nothing to lose by packing his bags
and following his girlfriend to New York City. "I moved with no
money and realized that everything was against me," he tells
Business Insider. "I had no work visa and
it was going to be near impossible to get a visa."

He applied for a £30,000 loan, which gave him enough to get by
for a couple of months while he figured out what he wanted to do.
"I basically turned up, no papers, no job," he says. "And that’s
when it started."

"My girlfriend would say, 'Go get yourself a job' every morning,
and I'd apply for a few jobs," he continues. "I was applying for
jobs hoping that the company would sponsor a visa for a job that
I couldn't start for another nine months after the visa became
available. Of course, no employer wanted to even deal with that.
I only got a handful of interviews in the 18 months I was here.
It was a near impossible situation. Everything was stacked
against me being here."

"I became a maniac about writing and sharing articles.
Contributors would turn up and share stories about what they
were seeing. Eventually, aggregation began to kick in. People
began to look to us for a judgment call on what’s
interesting."

So he did what many New Yorkers do to earn their right to live in
the city: He hustled. For Fawkes, that meant becoming a
professional dog walker and doing "all the crappy jobs someone
would do moving into the country."

But he also found a creative outlet, which would eventually
become his startup. "I took my girlfriend’s bicycle, camera, and
started taking photographs, finding all these amazing things
around the city. I found these new ideas in terms of culture,
business, and decided to share them."

He noticed that there was an emerging blogging community. "It was
hard to miss," he says. "I went to this party at [Gawker founder]
Nick Denton's apartment, and this woman
stands up and says, 'I’m going to start this website, 'The
Huffington Post.'"

So he started a blog of his own, PSFK.com. "I had this URL [from an
earlier venture], and I decided to save myself $25 and use the
URL I had before," he says. "I didn’t think it would turn into
anything. I became a maniac about writing and sharing articles.
Contributors would turn up and share stories about what they were
seeing. Eventually, aggregation began to kick in. People began to
look to us for a judgment call on what’s interesting."

Now PSFK has become a larger media site, documenting trends in
business, within the workplace, and around the world. It also has
a consultancy arm, which works with big-name clients like Apple
and BMW to tell them what's cool and
trending.

"About six months after starting, Anheuser Busch said, 'You seem
to know about trends, can you write a trends report about
Britain?'" he explains. "I’m paying off a loan, walking dogs, and
I thought, 'Hey, I have an advertising background.' I realized I
had a bunch of writers and contributors in the U.K. who can send
me data about what’s happening. In New York City, I can identify
trends. So I thought, of course I can write the U.K. trends
report. Today, with the collapse of online advertising, providing
private advice to companies has really supported our growth."

As PSFK has grown, so has the nature of its work. For example,
it's currently helping revitalize downtown Bogota, Colombia,
through a special project,
My Ideal City. Well-known architect and city planner Gary
Hack is crowdsourcing ideas about how to revitalize the city,
which he'll eventually present to the mayor and chair of
architecture. PSFK did a
trends analysis in urban living, and will be delivering its
findings to the city.

"What’s my job?" asks Fawkes. "Making sure that our thinking is
the most progressive that there is out there."

Today, he has 15 employees in New York, along with 20 regular
contributors and freelancers. He hasn't taken on any outside
funding. "If someone gave us a million dollars, we would have
hired a bunch of staff, but we would have done the same things."